Sunday, September 09, 2007

The most significant changes in this release include:• Completion of the –X:Interpret mode and its incorporation into the eval and exec functions• The addition of the -X:PreferComDispatch mode• Improved performance for the itertools module and the importing of CLR-based modules• A number of bug fixesLike previous Alpha releases, quite a bit of refactoring work has been completed and this process is still ongoing. In particular, effort has been put into making .NET interoperability easier for language implementers on the DLR.

-X:PreferComDispatch enables direct support for IDispatch COM objects, and includes support for indexers and output parameters in IDispatch-based calls. This will improve IronPython’s integration with IDispatch-based COM APIs such as in Microsoft Office.

Some of the notable bug fixes included in this release are:• _iter_ is now available for all iterable .NET objects with the exception of System.String (CPython’s string type does not support this)• isinstance now works on interfaces• fixed null reference exception when attempting to read a write-only (.NET) property• fixed invalid IL generated for Python code similar to ‘System.IComparable.CompareTo(1,1)’,